Life and death in dharmic materialism

According to the Indian writer Devdutt Pattanaik, the key difference between the Abrahamic faiths and the Dharmic faiths is that in the former we have one life, and then we are judged and go to heaven or hell; whereas in the latter we have multiple lives, and nothing is ever finally decided. Whereas in the Abrahamic faiths we only get one chance, in the dharmic faiths there are always second chances, and third and fourth and indeed trillionth chances. In the dharmic faiths, instead of being a judge, God, or the universe, is an accountant. Our fate is determined by the balance of our positive or negative karma, and how we react to our fate generates further karmic debt or credit, which affects the next round of our lives, and so on, ad infinitum. Now this, it seems to me, makes life less feverish. We do not have to worry about 'making a success of life', which is a western obsession precisely because western religion and mythology think of us as living a single life, a notion that gives our lives an enormous and excessive weight, as it were, symbolised by the notion that what happens in eternity, an eternity of either heaven or hell, is determined by what we do in the few years we have here on Earth. In the dharmic philosophies, by contrast, the ongoing series of lives is in a constant process of modifying its own future, we can always build back, and no individual span of life need have the same feverish, enclosed, claustrophobic quality. What I want to do is to transfer this dharmic 'many lives' perspective to materialism. I want to show how the dharmic perspective on life, which views our lives as belonging to an ongoing and open-ended series, can be adjusted to a materialist philosophy. I value my personality traits and I value the continuation of my core personality traits beyond my own life. I am pleased to think that the love of boys will continue to exist in the world, long after my death. I am pleased to think that the other passions I have, such as, for example, an interest in western philosophy, will continue in the world after my death. In some humans, these, and other of my core characteristics, will all occur together. Such persons can be regarded, from a materialist perspective, as iterations of my personality pattern, though there is, of course, no memory, no trace, of the events of my earlier life in these later iterations. Even if the human race becomes extinct, in a universe that is without beginning or end, and in which structure will always exist or recur (as I believe to be the case), there must, at some time, be a recreation of the earth and its history, and also a recreation of humanity, identical to the earth and the human species we know. And in such a recreation, my characteristics must occur again. To be clear, from a materialist perspective I cannot expect any post-mortem survival of identity. I do not expect to die and then to wake up in a celestial garden attended by cupbearers of eternal youth. I expect my identity to be annihilated; to become nothing. But my core personality traits will be reinstantiated, so that that which we value the most about ourselves can never be destroyed forever, given the nature of the universe, but must recur, again and again, to eternity. So what I care about in myself will also exist in others, and I can have a care for those others because of their instantiation of my core personality traits. And thus I can view their lives as being, in some sense, another attempt at living my life, that is, at unfolding the essence of my personality. And my present actions can indeed contribute, either destructively or constructively, to the society and biosphere that they will inherit. This gives me a personal reason (analogous to a self-interested reason) to care about the impact of my actions on others, and to act in constructive rather than destructive ways. And, insofar as I can have a care for the flourishing of future iterations of my personality pattern, so I can be less concerned for the regrets of my current life. I can instead dwell on the fact that this personality pattern will have multiple iterations, multiple chances to flourish, some of which are bound to be more fortunate than my present life. (Though I am very grateful for my present life.) From this perspective, what matters far more than my success or failure in this life is the contribution I make to the future through my actions, and this, after all, is something under my control. The success or failure of my actions in this life, by contrast, are not something to which it is wise to be too attached, as Krishna taught Arjuna on the field of Kurukshetra, in the Bhagavad-gita. Of course, in the dharmic religions, concern for one's future rebirth, though perfectly rational, was not the ultimate end of religious practice. The ultimate end would be liberation from the cycle of lives: moksha (Hinduism, Jainism) or nirvana (Buddhism). How could we view moksha through a materialist lens? To attain moksha is to have no ego at all, and this is equivalent to adopting 'the point of view of the universe'. From such a completely impersonal viewpoint, I would be no more concerned for my own fate than for the fate of any other sentient being. Furthermore, since my concern for future iterations of my personality pattern is an extension of my particular care for its present iteration, I would no longer be specially concerned for my future iterations; so this would amount, psychologically, to 'liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth'. The result would be a certain total ataraxia, since we would no longer be troubled by our own particular fate, or by the fate of future iterations of ourselves; and the fate of sentient beings generally is more or less a constant. Whether one desires moksha will, perhaps, depend on the kind of person one is. It is not irrational to be motivated so as to seek it, but nor is it irrational not to be so motivated; and I can't say that I personally find the thought of moksha attractive, though it is also true to say that I can hardly even imagine what it could be like to dwell perpetually in such a cosmically impersonal state of being. All the above is to be taken as entirely speculative.